The IEC 61850 Europe 2017 Conference: Content

The 4th annual IEC 61850 Europe conference took place in Amsterdam from the 26th to the 28th of October. We publish online the presentations made at the conference and the impression about the event of one of its participants.

The General Observations

We asked our author Igor Mets to share the most interesting moments of the event.

Igor Mets

Elering AS

Firts of all, IEC61850 standard package is growing and becoming more efficient.

The key words for this year conference are the following:

Specification and implementation of own IEC 61850 profile for exact needs of utility are being done (actually ENTSO-E is monitoring and active on EU TSO unified profile for IEC 61850 since 2012).

More IEC 61850 projects under realization are based on specified requirements for IEC 61850.

Simulation and modelling are more actively used.

Benefits from implementation are clearly visible, but they need to be well defined by e.g. tender requirements.

IEC 61850 is also covering other areas such as street lights, energy storage, revenue metering, STATCOM, FSC, SVC, etc. So, it is applicable to smart grids and micro grids as well.

SCL is suitable for describing almost everything, but the redundancy of LAN.

Updating on the Edition 2 implementation landscape and understanding how utilities and suppliers are working together to drive the deployment of next generation systems Evaluating the latest working group developments with:

Engineering process;

HMI configuration;

Modbus mapping;

IED Redundancy;

Alarm handling;

Logic modelling.

Reviewing progress being made with cyber-security and NERC-CIP; to what extent can this be leveraged in Europe?

Reviewing global implementations of IEC 61850 and identifying lessons for European utilities.

The Presentations of the Second Day

Igor Mets

Elering AS

The process bus needs a definition. For example, during a panel the group with leader Alex Apostolov set up the extended definition for process bus which is “the combination of all interfaces between the process and the SPACS communicating data and information that can be shared between the PIU and the SPACS functions”.

There were discussions of different issues about MU functionality, the simultaneous publishing of many SV streams, the embedded MU, the DSO and TSO relations, as well as the standard IEC 61869-9, sampling rate (frames/sec) that is dependent on different grid frequencies in different countries, the centralized relay protection, the virtual MU, the redundancy of MMXU in case of one MU malfunction, the saving of space, the monitoring and testing, etc.